I wish it was a contrived problem. However, this is the conceit by which
the edits are attributed for licensing purposes, and it's a non-trivial
matter. While I'm fully supportive of finding another way to do this, it
is a fundamental issue that would require fairly extensive
legal consultation to change, given that we've been using "IP address as
assigned to a specific individual" as the licensee for...what, almost 14
years?
We know that Tor exit nodes are (by definition) not IP addresses assigned
to the contributor, and there is no reasonable prospect of tracing back to
the original IP address (unlike many other anonymising proxies). Thus the
attribution issue.
Realistically there is no reasonable prospect of tracing back an
individual IP to a real person 80% of the time without a court order,
which is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Even then you can only
really link the IP to who's paying the bill, which is only weakly
circumstantially related to who really "owns" the edit.
If we're going to consider the theoretical possibility that we can
might be able to link back an IP to a person with certainly, we might
as well start considering that we might be able to do the same if we
get everyone in the tor circuit to collude...
--bawolff